Human Echolocation for Localization and Navigation – Behaviour and Brain Mechanisms
The multimodal number sense: spanning space, time, sensory modality, and action
Humans and other animals can estimate rapidly the number of items in a scene, flashes or tones in a sequence and motor actions. Adaptation techniques provide clear evidence in humans for the existence of specialized numerosity mechanisms that make up the numbersense. This sense of number is truly general, encoding the numerosity of both spatial arrays and sequential sets, in vision and audition, and interacting strongly with action. The adaptation (cross-sensory and cross-format) acts on sensory mechanisms rather than decisional processes, pointing to a truly general sense.
Towards multi-system network models for cognitive neuroscience
Artificial neural networks can be useful for studying brain functions. In cognitive neuroscience, recurrent neural networks are often used to model cognitive functions. I will first offer my opinion on what is missing in the classical use of recurrent neural networks. Then I will discuss two lines of ongoing efforts in our group to move beyond the classical recurrent neural networks by studying multi-system neural networks (the talk will focus on two-system networks). These are networks that combine modules for several neural systems, such as vision, audition, prefrontal, hippocampal systems. I will showcase how multi-system networks can potentially be constrained by experimental data in fundamental ways and at scale.